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Liveblogging WotLK Beta Build 8770

Blizzard has updated the Wrath of the Lich King beta realms with a new build: 8770. As usual with beta build, the patch notes are not significantly updated so we’re largely on our own for finding changes.

I’m done with the liveblogging thing now and this post is complete. Fair warning — it’s rather scattershot. :>

First major change: Beast Mastery, the 51-point BM talent, has now been fully implemented. According to Koraa on the WOtLK Beta Hunter forum:

The NYI tag should be off now, it’s completely implemented. Though, we’re still working on the pets themselves.

No mention of what the new exotics are yet, but hey — 5 more pet talent points is nothing to sneeze at!

Okay, I’m in! The Wintergrasp zone is apparently open, but I happened to be logged out in Sholazar Basin, right above some new gorillas!

I believe these gorillas replaced the bristlepine boars that were here before.

Also, there’s a new piece of the threat display – a red dot that shows up next to the portrait of either you or your pet, depending on who has aggro.

Mammoth artwork is now in, but the mammoths I see in Sholazar Basicn do not seem to be tameable. Were there mammoths here before? You know, I think the map may have changed. Hmm .. and it looks like the map-clearing-when-you-discover-a-place is working now too. Excellent!

The Goretalon Matriarch that I posted about earlier today is no longer bugged, and she can be tamed. Unfortunately she’s level 78 so I can’t tame her yet.

The Sapphire Hive drones, which I had thought were silithids even though they are labeled as beasts, cannot be tamed. The Primoridal Drakes can also not be tamed. Nor can the rhinos, the hydras, or the giraffes. Of course, this is just in Sholazar Basin. There may be tameable examples elsewhere.

Wintergrasp is pretty, but there don’t appear to be any NPCs at all here and certainly no beasts. So I think I’ll skip it for now.

Arctic Ram cannot be tamed. Neither can Blighted Elk. That’s a pity — I was really hoping for elk.

The world server went down, so I logged in Kate (who is in Kalimdor) — and she earned the title “Flame Warden” on login. Cute!

Confirmation on the worms! They are an exotic pet — and Beast Lore even says so. And indeed, you must have the Beast Mastery talent now to tame exotics — when I try (untalented) I get the message: “Creature not tameable.”

I hope that that is a temporary error message and that it will eventually tell you why you can’t tame this creature. But at any rate once I took the talent I could make the tame. And here is Kaet with her (rather disturbing) worm!

Worms eat cheese, bread, and fungus. They use the Tenacity tree. They know Bite and their family skill is Acid Spit:

Silithus seems like a good place to pick up a silithid also, but the wasp-like ones here aren’t labeled as beasts even. But ahha! There’s a Hive’Regal Ambusher, and he can be tamed! And as Vabuka points out in the comments, he is incredibly twitchy!

Silithids eat meat and fungus and use the Cunning tree. They know Claw and their family skill s Venom Web Spray:

As an aside, Sean on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum has pointed out that pets in this build no longer have resistance skills in their spellbook. Instead it looks like pets get 1 point of each resistance for each level.

While Hive’Regal has red silithids, Hive’Zora has yellow ones and Hive’Ashi green ones. The shape is the same, though, on the tameable ones. Pity — I wanted a big beetle

Hmph. Okay, there are a lot of new beasts for me to track down and tame. I’m going to call this liveblog over and get down to work. I hope to have a round-up of the worms and silithids later this evening or tomorrow.

Beta testers, I’d love your help! Just e-mail me a screenshot of the creature with the Beast Lore tooltip showing. Doesn’t have to be artistic — I won’t be posting it. :> I just need to know what color the beast is, what level, and whether or not it can be tamed. Thanks!

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117 thoughts on “Liveblogging WotLK Beta Build 8770”

Korhgal, while I think Palla did a really nice summary of the Cunning pets abilities, there’s one thing he forgot that I think will also be a nice addition to raiding.

Roar of Recovery
1 rank

Your pet’s inspiring roar restores 20% of your total mana over 8 sec.

34 Focus, Instant, 40 yd range, 6 min cooldown

Since you’re a raiding hunter I honestly don’t see why you don’t find a mini Innervate useful. I know the cooldown might seem a bit long, but with Longevity it will be shorter. Cunning pets also have a “perma” Dash/Dive with talents, so it you need to pull the pet back to you, you won’t have to worry about it being on cooldown.

Roar of Sacrifice from the Tenacity pets can also be nice for raiding, as it is like a PW: Shield that scales with the pet’s health. Don’t view your pets as DPS only, as it can be worth it to have them do a wee bit less damage yet offer really good utility in exchange.

Regarding the 5 extra talent points from 51-point BM: the Ferocity tree currently has a problem where you can get all of the DPS talents + 3/3 Avoidance with only 16 points in the tree. That means the extra 5 talent points from BM currently won’t increase your DPS at all, so the only deep raiding DPS increase will be from the exotic pet ability. A full stack of Monstrous Bite is a flat 9% damage increase for your devilsaur, and the extra 5 talent points helps ensure your pet stays alive to apply that damage, so it would probably give better returns than other options for a single talent point. That said, I also expect to see the Ferocity tree changed to include more DPS talents or their prerequisites rearranged so that you need more than 16 pet talent points to get them all. When it comes to the Cunning and Tenacity trees, the extra 5 points from BM are already useful (e.g. you need the BM talent to get all of Wolverine Bite, Owl’s Focus and Roar of Recovery along with Avoidance and the other DPS talents like Spiked Collar and Cobra Strikes).

Regarding Monstrous Bite scaling: looks to me like someone scaled its damage while looking at the scaling of the base pet ability Bite, forgetting that Bite gets a new rank every 8 levels while ranked family abilities only get a new rank every 16 levels so they need to scale twice as fast. I expect to see this change.

Regarding the DPS difference between Ferocious and Cunning pets: I haven’t actually tested the DPS output of the Cunning tree, merely pointed out that the contest between +5% damage, Wolverine Bite and Owl’s Focus and Roar of Recovery for the Cunning pets, and +10% damage, Rabid and Roar of Ferocity for the Ferocious Pets doesn’t have an obvious winner at this early stage of the beta. When you consider that some pets with high DPS special attacks like Wind Serpents use the Cunning tree, there is definite potential for Owl’s focus to be very effective over the course of a boss fight. So until we have people actually getting to level 80 and Blizzard start doing their sustained and burst DPS tuning pass over everyone’s abilities I don’t see much point in worrying about it.

Regarding Tenacious pets in 25-man raids: it will happen if the raid DPS boost from the pet’s family ability (e.g. the Worm armour debuff) is enough to counter the loss of personal DPS from the hunter. If it doesn’t happen, then I honestly don’t have a problem with it – we have 3 pet families which are going to be useful for different aspects of the game. In a 10-man raid, the PW-shield effect from Roar of Sacrifice as well as the caster-tanking abilities of the pet are likely to be quite useful.

Regarding exotic pets being better than non-exotic pets: firstly, not everyone is going to go 51-point BM in the expansion. With the removal of the auto shot clipping mechanic, the DPS gap between BM and the other specs is going to narrow substantially because our scaling mechanics will no longer be weighted so heavily in favour of haste. So yes, the min/max BM hunters may consistently use the same 3 or 4 pet families (just as they do on live today), but really, most of the Ferocious and Cunning pet families (exotic and non-exotic alike) should be within a few percent of each other after Blizzard are done with their DPS tuning pass later in the beta.

Regarding BM sustained DPS potential in Wrath: bearing in mind that BM hunters are already rivalling rogues for single-target DPS in Sunwell while bringing a significant stacking group DPS buff in the form of Ferocious Inspiration, let’s look at the buffs raiding hunters are already getting in Wrath:
- no more auto shot clipping (this is a big DPS boost, even over the TBC 3:2 macro)
- pet skill->talent changes should work out to a big DPS boost for all hunters
- Improved Tracking in Tier 1 SV is a major upgrade over the old Slaying talents
- Careful Aim in Tier 2 MM now gives every hunter 100% of their Intellect as AP
- the extra-attack effect from Windfury totem is being replaced with 20% haste, which is a nerf for most melee DPS but a buff for hunters (since we used to not benefit from Windfury at all)
- the Grace of Air buff is being moved to Strength of Earth so it can be active along with Windfury even when there is only one shaman dropping the totems
- with totems going raid-wide, raiding hunters will be less dependent on an ideal group composition
- the latest versions of Chimera and Explosive Shot are shaping up to be decent DPS boosts for raiding MM and SV hunters
- Kill Shot should also provide a decent DPS upgrade for MM and SV hunters (and possibly even BM hunters)
- the only sustained DPS nerf we have seen so far is a fairly minor one in the form of the change to Kill Command (which looks to to be a preliminary step in repositioning that as a burst damage ability).

I really don’t like the fact that worms and silithids are tameable =/ I don’t really know why… Maybe because they don’t have the hunter feel to them =/ At least to me they don’t… It’s mostly the silithids though. I’m sure they’ll make good pets stat and ability wise, but something just isn’t right…

It’s possible that the Silithids found out what the Lich King did to their Nerubian cousins, and that some of them are willing to fight alongside the Alliance and Horde in order to get revenge on the Scourge and their master for the atrocities they commited against the Nerubians.

I know they’re very evil, but when you factor in what the plague is doing to your body and mind, if I where them, I’d be worried that it can not only wipe out my race, but also turn friends and family against me. Assuming I myself don’t get killed, then continue to “live” on as a walking corpse, which is something many would rather not have happen to them.

OK, osmeting just crossed my mind and I have to ask a question. Don’t know if this is the place for it, but I am gonna post it here anyway. So, here is my question…. Cunning pets will get a talent called carrion feeder in their talent tree. Some of the pets in that tree an’t eat meat. So, my question is, will these critters that don’t eat meat still be able to use carrion feeder? i am guessing yes, but it would seem odd that bats and sporebats (pets that can’t be fed meet) would be able to scavenge a corpse? Anybody know anything about this?

It’s unclear how much intelligence individual drone silithid have ANYWAY. Remember, they were bred as a servant race for the Qiraji; they’re not direct descendants of the Aqir the same way the Nerubians and their Qiraji masters are. I’m willing to bet that other than hive-controller-type silithids, they don’t have much more than animal intelligence. That a hunter might be able to lure one away from the hive mind to tame as a companion doesn’t seem all that crazy to me–even if they were of intelligence nearly on par with one of the intelligent races, we have precedent for taming that, too. Raptors in WoW wear jewelry and appear to have a fairly sophisticated (if extremely primitive) society, pointing at them being more intelligent than simple animals. (I always imagined that hunters who “tamed” raptors actually made a deal with them on the level of one intelligent being to another–help me, fight with me as a packmate, and I’ll take care of you and feed you.)

For worms, why not? They’re beasts, they’re aggressive. I find people wanting to tame things like giraffes and zhevras weirder, since there are no aggressive members of those families anywhere, indicating they have no form of predatory or territorial behavior… Which is kinda what you’d want to see in an animal you want to train to fight for you. Even the “vegetarian” pet families (sporebats, moths, bats, tallstriders, etc.) boast at least one aggressive mob and usually more in the family.

Once again, I was thinking. This time thogh, thinking didn;t get me in trouble. I was just thinking about how back in the day, some of the rare spawns (Deathflayer and The Rake, just to name a couple) were beefed up versions of normal critters. Any chance of going back to that and maiing them “exotic” It would be nice to have a cat with a hit rate like The Rake, or a scorpid like Deathflayer. Go back to makinf the rare elites more powerful, but make them exotic. That would be kinda cool to me.